Companies & Studios

Cloanto

Keepers of the Commodore and Amiga ROMs

The Italian software company that legally owns and preserves the classic Commodore and Amiga system ROMs, distributing them through Amiga Forever and C64 Forever.

commodore-amigacommodore-64 preservationdistributionlegalromsamiga-foreverc64-forever 1981–present

Overview

Cloanto is an Italian software company, run by Mike Battilana, best known for keeping the Commodore and Amiga platforms legally alive long after Commodore itself was gone. Through its Amiga Forever (first released 1997) and C64 Forever packages, Cloanto distributes the original system ROMs — the Amiga's Kickstart and Workbench, the C64's KERNAL and BASIC — bundled with emulators and games, under proper licence.

For anyone learning to write code for these machines today, Cloanto is the quiet answer to an awkward question: where do I legally get the ROMs?

Fast Facts

  • Run by: Mike Battilana
  • Country: Italy
  • Founded: 1981
  • Known for: Amiga Forever (1997), C64 Forever
  • Owns: the classic Commodore/Amiga ROM and OS copyrights (consolidated into Amiga Corporation, 2019)

Why a company owns 40-year-old ROMs

When Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, its intellectual property scattered through a long chain of buyers, and the trademarks and the software copyrights drifted apart — changing hands separately over the decades. Cloanto, already the licensed distributor of the Amiga ROMs since the 1990s, consolidated the classic copyrights — covering Commodore/Amiga works up to the early 1990s — into Amiga Corporation (a Battilana entity) in 2019.

That ownership was tested and upheld: in 2025 the US Ninth Circuit ruled in Cloanto's favour in Cloanto v. Hyperion, confirming that a copyright owner's right to enforce cannot be signed away by contract.

The upshot: those system ROMs are still owned, still licensed, and still sold — they are not free for the taking, however old they are.

Preservation, not lock-up

Cloanto's role sits in tension with the abandonware culture that grew up around old software. Where abandonware treats forgotten code as fair game, Cloanto's model is licensed preservation: pay a few pounds, get the genuine ROMs, legally. It is closer to licenseware than to the free-for-all — the platforms stay available, but on the rights-holder's terms.

Why it matters here

The ROMs that boot a Commodore machine are not Cloanto's to give away for free, and they are not ours either. That is why this curriculum is free but its ROMs are bring-your-own: buy them once through C64 Forever or Amiga Forever, dump them from real hardware you own, or use open replacements where they exist.

Cloanto's reach covers the machine's ROMs, not the third-party tools built on top — the AMOS and Blitz Basic language systems have their own, separate owners.

See Also